The Gift: Novel

by Hilda Doolittle

  Papalie is leading them out of Egypt but they do not know that. He is leading them to the Promised Land which is just around the corner, only a week or a few days, for this is part of Christmas. You may wonder what a lump of clay and matchsticks has to do with Christmas, but if you are a stranger in our town, you will be told, if you will wait quietly in the other room under the picture of Jedediah Weiss who is Mamalie’s father, who is dead. If you belong to the town, you will know all about Christmas, I mean the real Christmas with a putz under the tree. If you are a stranger, you will say, “What a funny word, I mean, I don’t understand,” and Mamalie will say, “Oh, it’s German but we never found another word for it.” If you are well-informed, you may say, “I suppose it derives from something.” “Putz-en,” Mamalie may say, “to decorate or to trim.”

  It is part of the tree, the most important part, the children think. “It is what you put,” says Tootie, “I think; I think putz is what you put on the moss,” and they all laugh, for Tootie is very quick and clever, they say, not like the Professor’s children who are so quiet, but the Professor’s children do talk sometimes. Gilbert the oldest, who is two years older than Hilda, talks quite a lot and makes jokes. Once, walking on the mountains with Papalie, he saw an old goat that belonged to some of the shanty-people, as they called them, behind the mills. “Look, Papalie,” he said, “look at that goat, it looks like you, Papalie.”

  Everybody told that story often; Gilbert was rather bored with it. He had said it when he was only a little boy, younger than Tootie even, who now said things they thought were quick and clever and cute. Papalie came back and told them the story. Hilda, who is the only girl, sitting between Gilbert and Tootie, wondered a long time about it. “Does he look like a goat, Mamalie?” Mamalie laughed and said, “It was just his white beard and maybe the way his hair curled over his ears.” Papalie’s hair is not like goats’ horns, but if you look and look at him, maybe he is like a goat. Hilda never thought it was so funny, though they always laughed and kept on telling it, though now Tootie said the funny things, like “Putz is a place where you put things under the Christmas tree.”

  What he did was, he took his ivory paper-knife and cut off an edge of the lump of clay. The clay lay on the damp cloth, like the dough Ida mixed in our kitchen. He turned back the edges of the cloth around the clay. He took the clay in his hands and rolled it, like Ida makes a biscuit. He pulled at one end, and you knew exactly that it would not look like a sheep. But when he jabbed two points in the face and drew a line for a mouth with the handle of his pen, you knew exactly what it was; it was eyes and a sheep-mouth, though it would not show very much until he had finished several sheep and put them aside to dry.

  Afterwards, he would ink in the eyes with black ink and draw a little line in red ink for the mouth. What he did was, he made several sheep like that in a row, like Ida’s biscuits on the kitchen table.

  He pulled the cotton wool into little puffs and stuck the puffs of wool on the sheep. But first he stood them up on legs, that is what the matchsticks were for, and the burnt-out ends of the matchsticks were the sheep’s hooves. He made small sheep too, those were the lambs, and at the end, he made one large sheep. This was the special moment. He cut off bits of wire from the small coil of wire, he bent the wire into shape, he stuck in the wire horns. All this time, we were sitting on the sofa. The sheep stood up on their match-stick legs, but he would not put in their faces until they were quite dry.

  He also had little pointed bits of stiff paper which he had inked red for their ears. That is what he did. Later, before we went to bed, when we were a bit older, say, two years older, Mama would get down the old boxes of Christmas-tree things from the attic and open them on the dining room table. From inside the crinkled faded tissue paper that a glass ball was wrapped in, there would come a sort of whisper, and a sprinkling of tiny old dead pine needles would fall on the table, from last year’s tree.

  We carefully unwrapped the balls, not remembering, hardly remembering anything of what had happened last Christmas but how under the carpet, it would be impossible, even if you wanted to, to shut out the “thing” that the fallen pine needles on the table conjured up; there was the moment when it began to happen, when indeed it had happened; that was not the exact moment when the boxes were set down on the table, not even the moment that Mama unknotted the old bit of red ribbon fastened round the flat somewhat-battered cardboard box that had cardboard compartments for the separate glass balls. The compartments were not full, for some glass balls were always broken, but we would go to the five-and-ten and get some more balls, some more silver or gilt lengths of trimming, as we called it, though it was all trimming.

  On the table, we made separate heaps of the things; the glass balls in their open box were gone over, like toys in a toy-hospital. It was this special moment when Mama said, “See if you can find the end of an old candle, Sister, among the paper cornucopias,” that the “thing” began.

  The “thing” could not begin if there were not an old end or several almost burnt-out stumps of last year’s beeswax candles. Whoever untrimmed the tree never forgot those candle-ends. It had to be the beeswax candles, the special candles that were used for the children’s Christmas Eve service; the red and pink and blue and green five-and-ten boxes of candles could be seen all the year round, at home or anywhere, on anybody’s birthday cake.

  But this was another sort of birthday; it was, of course, exactly, the birthday of the Child in the manger, in whose honor we had arranged the sheep on the moss, yet it was something else, indefinable yet deeply personal, something our perception recognized though our thought did not then relate our Child to the other Holy Children, His racial or spiritual or mythological predecessors. We arranged the sheep on the moss, but we did not think of Amen-Ra or the Golden Fleece, or even Abraham and Isaac. We gathered the moss ourselves, on trips to the mountains, or Uncle Hartley or Uncle Bob would make an excuse to get the moss for us. “Helen, all the thick moss has been pulled off the rocks for miles around, it’s too far for the children.” If it were a snowy December, the aunts and uncles might hire a sleigh and go off together and come back, screaming and laughing, with bunches of mountain laurel. Fir trees and pine and the laurel bough, We are twining in wreathes to greet thee now.

  It was not only a small Child in a manger, in a stable, in a town that had the same name as our town. It was not only those wooden Wise Men that Aunt Millie had on their putz or the star that was clipped onto the highest single upstanding top-spray of the tree. It was not only the smell of the moss, it was not only the smell of the spiced ginger-dough that was waiting under a cloth in the biggest yellow bowl on the pantry shelf, and yet it was all these; it was all these and the forms of the Christmas cakes, the lion, the bear, the lady with no arms, like Mrs. Noah, the oak leaf, the round circle we called the moon, the actual star, the other animals.

  The “thing” was that we were creating. We were “making” a field under the tree for the sheep. We were “making” a forest for the elk, out of small sprays of a broken pine-branch. We ourselves were “making” the Christmas cakes. As we pressed the tin mold of the lion or the lady into the soft dough, we were like God in the first picture in the Doré Bible who, out of chaos, created Leo or Virgo to shine forever in the heavens. “We” were like that, though we did not know it. Our perception recognized it, though our minds did not define it. God had made a Child, and we children in return now made God; we created Him as He had created us, we created Him as children will, out of odds and ends; like magpies, we built Him a nest of stray bits of silver thread, shredded blue or rose or yellow colored paper; we knew our power. We knew that God could not resist the fragrance of a burning beeswax candle!

  There was the prickly sting of the pine needles under the rope that fastened the branches. The tree was standing on the back porch, looped round so that it stood up thin and stiff; at this moment, a child’s very ribs and diaphragm would be changed for a whole year with that deep inta
ke of breath as Ida or Mama or even the new gardener cut the thick cord that bound the limbs; living limbs were bound and cramped in their rope cage.

  There was that actual intake of breath (and the almost unbearable outbreathing of joy bordering on ecstasy) when the cord fell on the floor and nobody cared, nobody stopped to pick it up, though after Ida might call through the swing doors from the dining room, “Will one of you children undo these knots for me—this is good twine—and put it in the kitchen drawer.”

  No; we will not undo her knots for her. We have other things to do, we are busy. Mama has bought a new pot of paste, “Unscrew the top, Gilbert, will you. There is a brush, too, where have I put it? Harold, run out to the kitchen and fill a glass with water. Where are my scissors? What a lot of old needles this year—take care—here, spill them out on this,” and she spreads out a piece of brown wrapping paper, “we’ll put all the scraps on this. That tinsel looks pretty dull, but perhaps we can use it once more at the back of the tree, for filling in. Maybe, you’ll find the top of this ball among the papers, Sister, if not, you can fasten a lump of wax to stick the hook in, you know how to do it. Here—” she finds the little candlestump.

  There is still a frayed edge of the original red paper around the base, stuck to the wax. “I wonder whose candle this was, did you have a green or a red one last year?” Hilda cannot remember. Last year is a very, very long way off. Last year just after Christmas, they moved from the old town and the old house to this new big house that was built with the new transit house and the new observatory that wasn’t yet finished, for Papa, when they asked him to come to the university in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, even, is quite a long way off, Papa goes in to teach his students at the classes there. Papa is out now at his transit house; he may come in at any moment in his high boots and his fur cap, like a Russian in that picture they had at the Widows’ House that Mama said she and Aunt Laura made up stories about.

  Zeisberger* preaching to the Indians is hanging in the sitting room, Washington at Mount Vernon is in the hall; the same clock is ticking in the hall that Mamalie’s papa himself made. It is a grandfather’s clock, it was made by Mama’s grandfather.

  Everything is the same, yet in the great tide-wave of moving everything is different. What fun to move; “Papa is going to a bigger university, they are building him a transit house.” “What’s a transit house?” “I don’t know, it’s something important.” They felt alienated but important before they left, and the last Christmas tree was not quite like the others, but the reason for that—Papalie was dead, there was a new baby.

  There was the painful wrench from the school but that pain too was mitigated; Miss Helen was leaving to get married, anyway. She gave each of her children a carte-de-visite photograph as Aunt Jennie called them; the reason, Aunt Jennie said, was that the photograph was not much larger than a visiting card. There were visiting cards from the Philadelphia ladies who came to call. There were many visiting cards on the Dresden platter on the table in the hall.

  Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair was set on an easel in the front room. There were two rooms with big folding doors; there had been two rooms with folding doors in the old house. We folded the doors and pinned up a sheet for the magic lantern or for pinning on the donkey’s tail. There had been parties like that with the children up and down the street; now the children, the nearest, were two miles away. The school was a public school; “The children are too young,” Mama would explain to the university ladies, “to send in to town yet.” The new school was horrible.

  There was something horrible about the school. We took lunch in a basket and did not get back until four. At the old school we went home at noon for lunch and did not go back to school until two, and then home at four. There were hours which were torture, it was too far to walk home in that noon hour and back. There was twelve to one for lunch. Now time included a new factor, a school clock in a public school ticked differently from the church clock in the old town. There was no doubt about it. There was nothing to do because Gilbert didn’t seem to mind and ran off and played baseball with the other older boys, but Harold was lonely with no child to play with.

  Hilda felt Harold’s pain and loneliness but could not translate it into words. Later, she learned to get through the hour by skipping rope with the other girls, children from the near farms and from the small village. “It’s not that they’re common.” There were no words for it. They were different, they were younger in mind and reasoning; “Don’t think I will make any distinction with your children,” one of the teachers had said to Mama. It was a funny way for anyone to talk to Mama. We go to a public school; that is not what is wrong. It isn’t that the room smells differently, it’s the way the clock ticks on the wall.

  Now there were sounds. There was the crinkling of the paper as Mama swept aside the pieces from the old box; there had been the rustle of the old pine needles, yet it was very quiet. Ida was opening the stove lid, she was pouring in coal from the coal scuttle. She would lock the back door. It was dark outside. There was a big maple tree in front of the house; they had built the house just there because of the three big maple trees. There were no other trees. The ground had been ploughed up, it had been an old cornfield. There would be a lawn, they would put up the sundial that was now in the empty room in the wing that was to have the university books later.

  The wing was empty. There were three rooms upstairs in the wing and an extra bathroom, and downstairs, the big empty library and the hall with the wing door, as we called it. Papa was expecting an assistant to live there, and maybe Eric would come too. Eric and Mr. Evans, whom we had just met, would move into the wing later; then the wing would be full. Now the wing was empty. Ida had a big room over the kitchen. There was Annie, too, but Annie was sitting upstairs with the baby.

  There was a farm beyond, fields, and cows in a shed. The wind blew through the maple branches, and Ida had put down the coal scuttle. Harold had brought back the glass of water for the paste brush. “Here, give it to me, Gilbert,” Mama said, for Gilbert had not been able to unscrew the top of the new paste pot. In a minute, maybe Papa would come in with his beard and his fur cap and his high boots, then maybe Mama would send us all to bed. This minute must last forever. It would last forever.

  The clock in the hall ticked off this minute, so this minute belonged to the clock in the hall, it belonged to Mamalie and to Papalie who was dead. The clock in the hall would strike but even if it struck, it would not matter. Now Mama did not send us off to bed so early. Mama was unscrewing the top of the new paste pot. She set it down on the table and put the sticky lid on the brown paper. All around us were the table, the dining room chairs, the sideboard and the china cupboard with dishes that Aunt Mary (who wasn’t a real aunt) had painted for Mama’s wedding, with bluebells and daisies and wild roses.

  The university ladies would say, “But aren’t you afraid, cut off like this, miles from a doctor?” Then they would hush their voices and whisper behind the folding door, you could almost hear what they said. The folding door might be shut but even so, there was a large crack; “Now run along Hilda” or “Run along Sister,” Mama would say, and I would go out, maybe possibly to ask Ida to bring in tea on a tray. It was different here, the ladies had to hear everything over and over, maybe even, one had not heard of the Moravians or the Bach choir, or else like Mrs. Schelling, they would talk about Vienna and where they had gone.

  Mama had been to Europe on her honeymoon; there were the pictures. Paul Potter’s Bull was over the bench in the hall that had a lid and was a box really for our leggings and our overshoes. The Venus de Milo was in the sitting room, there were those two rooms and now here, the dining room. There was a narrow hall with two swing doors from the dining room to the kitchen. There was a hen on the chest across the table. It showed just over Harold’s head. It was a white hen. It was sitting on a china basket; if you picked it up, you saw that it was hollow, the china nest was for boiled eggs. Mamalie had one too, hers was grey and
speckled. The hen sat on the dresser opposite the table. It was the same hen that had sat on the same dresser in the old dining room.

  Aunt Jennie brought Hilda some Chinese lily bulbs and showed her how to plant them in a bowl with water and pebbles. Mama said Hilda could have them in their bowl in the old dining room on the window ledge. There was that window that looked out on the alley, which was really not an alley but a lane, but Uncle Hartley said allée was French really, and maybe their alley was named allée by the Marquis de Chastellux when he came to visit the town. Uncle Hartley made fun of all the old things, and all the same they were true, Aunt Aggie said.

  There were two other windows in the old dining room and a door, through a hall like this, to the kitchen, and another door leading up a few steps to the back stairs and through to the kitchen that way. There were two other windows in the old dining room, but rather dark as they opened on the porch that was roofed over and anyhow, had the vines growing.

  This room has four windows, set even, like windows in a doll house. The table is in the middle. There are three doors; one leads out to the hall, one to the sitting room, one to the kitchen. Hilda seemed to be running this over ritualistically in her head, as if it were necessary to remember the shape of the house, each room, the hen on the dresser, the dishes shut away in the sideboard, before she dared turn her eyes actually to the table, to the tangled heap of tarnished tinsel, to the empty box that had held the glass balls, to the miscellaneous collection of gilt stars, red, blue and pink cornucopias and paper chains that were torn, that Mama called the paper things; there were dolls too in that lot, several babies in paper gilt highchairs, some dancers in fluffed-out short white petticoats, standing on one toe, and angels sprinkled with glistening snow that was beginning to peel off.